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Create a Cartoon Effect From a Photo in Photoshop

I will have to say that this is one of the easiest tutorials ever. Just a couple of clicks away and you are done. I did a little bit of research on this and it seemed that so many of the tutorials for creating a cartoon effect were terribly over engineered. There are so many sites and books showing how to do all of these type of things. My philosophy on photoshop projects is to keep things as simple as possible. That being said, it certainly can depend on the picture. Some pictures will do better than others with this technique. Some photos will do better with different settings than I have here. As always, you will just have to play around with settings until you have it the way you want it.

This is the picture I will begin with.

Now we will just need to apply a simple filter to create our cartoon style drawing. From the file menu click Filter/Artistic/Poster Edges. Depending on which version of Photoshop you are using, you should come up with something that looks like the picture below. The settings shown are what I used to for this particular project. I just cranked everything all the way up. As stated before, you may need to play around with some of the settings here to achieve the cartoon effect you are looking for. Click OK.

One thing to keep in mind is how big the picture is, and what the resolution is. These things will affect how the picture responds to different settings of the filter. This picture started out at 3456x2304 at a resolution 72 pixels/inch. Enjoy!!

Here are the before and after shots. For a larger image of the finshed cartoon picture, click here.